If you alread knew about the Dvorak layout, then you may have noticed that the keymap that ships with BeOS is broken. The Caps-Lock key modifies all the keys, not only the letter keys. While this problem does not affect most people most of the time, it is anonying.

However, this can be overcome by using the power of the command-line tool keymap and an appropriate map file:

Download this file, and save it somewhere in your home directory, such as /boot/home/config/etc. Then add the following line to your /boot/home/config/boot/UserBootscript. If you don’t have this file, just copy UserBootscript.sample to UserBootScript and then add this line:

keymap -l $HOME/config/etc/dvorak.bemap

Adjust the line to match if you put the file somewhere else.

More information, links, and hints on the topic of Dvorak can be found on my Dvorak page.